Neutrino Physics at MIT LNS

Super-K is a
giant underground water Cherenkov detector located in a mine in
the Japanese Alps, built to search for proton decay and to study neutrinos
from the sun, from cosmic ray collisions in the atmosphere, and from
supernovae. Super-K is currently being rebuilt and will be back in
operation in early 2003.

K2K, which stands for "KEK to Kamioka," is the first "long-baseline" neutrino experiment.
The idea is to test the neutrino oscillation interpretation of the atmospheric
neutrino results with an artificial beam of neutrinos generated at the KEK
Laboratory in Tsukuba, Japan. KEK sends the beam 250 km through the Earth
to the Super-K detector. In summer of 1999,
we detected the first long-distance
neutrinos, and preliminary results confirm the oscillation
hypothesis. The beam will restart in 2003.

SNEWS is an
inter-experiment collaboration of detectors with Galactic supernova
sensitivity. Neutrinos from a core collapse will precede the photon
signal by hours;
therefore coincident observation of a burst in several neutrino detectors
may be a robust early warning of a visible supernova. Our goals are to provide
the astronomical community with a prompt alert of a Galactic core collapse,
as well as to optimize global sensitivity to supernova neutrino physics.